Misogyny (1 Viewer)

moose said:
Who said that?
Click to expand...
Mary Duffin
Another woman, Mary Duffin, spoke movingly about the challenges of being a woman of colour in theatre. Her voice raw with emotion, she spoke about writing about a woman just like her – but that she knew that character would have to be played by a white woman, lest the play get shoved into the ‘black theatre’ corner.

“I wanted to do plays with black people in them, but I was told they’d all been done,” she said.

It goes to the heart of the issue really.
Minorities of almost any stripe are deemed to be one-note, one issue writers.
So if you let a play by a woman into your schedule, you've let the female narrative have its window, so to speak.

I honestly have no idea how you properly remedy this. The legacy issue for somewhere like Abbey will be difficult (If part of your financial plan is to frequently play greatest hits and all of your greatest hits are by dudes....) but the status quo seems unsustainable.
How do you adequately assess or oversee inclusiveness?

Hopefully it will embolden women, travelers, emigrants to write some stuff about Ireland. The best view is always from an in the thick of the herd.
And as much as I love O'Casey, how many fucking times can you show The Plough & The Stars?
 
7 - No tomorrow said:
And as much as I love O'Casey, how many fucking times can you show The Plough & The Stars?
Click to expand...
Wrong question. Because the answer is 'every year and forever' but leave that malarkey to The Gate for a while.
The Abbey and Peacock should be relevant.

Are there any Polish playwrights in Ireland?
That's a story I'd like to see. Living in Ireland as an immigrant. Can't imagine it would be 100% flattering.
 
“I wanted to do plays with black people in them, but I was told they’d all been done,” she said.

So, Othello, Merchant of Venice and..Porgy and Bess? I think that's everything
 
johnnystress said:
“I wanted to do plays with black people in them, but I was told they’d all been done,” she said.

So, Othello, Merchant of Venice and..Porgy and Bess? I think that's everything
Click to expand...
Controversially, The Abbey did a stage adaptation of Guess Who's Coming To Dinner? where the Sidney Poitier character never actually shows up.
 
Kevin Myers in today's ST.

So, where are all these brilliant female playwrights?
Then followed a week of Fallopia Whynge doing her online worst
Kevin Myers Published: 15 November 2015
NO SOONER had the Abbey Theatre announced its plans to commemorate 1916 than an online uproar followed, wherein all reason, facts, logic, moderation, history and common sense vanished.

The bedlam on Twitter was about the national theatre’s failure to feature enough female playwrights: there’s just one woman, Ali White, out of 10. That would be a fair point if there were others of quality. There really are not. Indeed, there are hardly any good male playwrights, and haven’t been for a long time. Which is perhaps why one of next year’s productions is a revival of Seán O’Casey’s tired old The Plough and the Stars, the theatrical equivalent of reissuing White Christmas.

If Fiach Mac Conghail, the Abbey’s director, had been really brave and wise, he’d have announced that such was the intellectual poverty and aridity of the Irish state created by the Philistines of 1916, the theatre was going dark for a year. Why not? You can count on two hands the numbers of playwrights that have emerged in this blessed plot, this Aden, since the Easter Rising: Frank McGuinness, Tom Murphy, Bernard Farrell, Conor McPherson, Thomas Kilroy and maybe a few more whose names escape me. Not Brian Friel (born in the oppressed Six Counties). Not Martin McDonagh (born in London). Aside from Marina Carr, not one woman of international status.

Mac Conghail declared: “All my new play choices are based on the quality of the play, form and theme. It’s my call, and I’m pleased with the plays I picked for Waking the Nation.”

Then followed a week of Fallopia Whynge doing her online worst with foam, froth, fang and claw — the Abbey Riots, Mark III, but this time with no WB Yeats to supply a spine or a patrician dismissal of the mob. And so, all changed, changed utterly; a terrible cutie was born.

“The fact that I haven’t programmed a new play by a female playwright is not something I can defend,” poor battered Fiach later whimpered, as he scrabbled around in the dust for his eyeballs. “This experience has presented a professional challenge to me as a programmer and has made me question the filter and factors that influence my decision-making.”

The theatre’s board, half of it women, which presumably authorised the 1916 playlist, then issued a statement of such abject fatuity it should be embalmed and bottled and displayed in the Natural History Museum as a prime example of that native Irish species Capitulens Cowardly Custardus. “The board and the director of the Abbey theatre acknowledge that the 2016 programme does not represent gender equality,” it said.

Does not represent gender equality? Of course it bloody doesn’t. The purpose of art is not equality, it’s the opposite: to show how unequal artists are. That’s why we pay to see their work. Similarly, when I buy bread or get my sink unblocked or have a tooth drilled, I want quality, not equality.

That said, I have some idea of why the Abbey capitulated as it did. To research this piece, I ventured into the world of social media, where many women were also ranting at the taoiseach on another issue, using their menstrual cycles, oh so rationally, as an argument. It was rather like wandering into an improvised performance of Marat/Sade by imprisoned axe-murderers with Tourette’s syndrome, all brandishing their multicoloured swabs and shrieking about their bodily discharges. In short, a periodic Babel that reminds us that the word hysteria comes from the Greek hysterikos, meaning “of the womb”.

Historically, as opposed to hysterically, there’ve been very few women playwrights, and Anglophone feminists would probably disdain the most successful one, Agatha Christie. Her plays don’t feature in the approved canon of female-authored plays, presumably because they’re well-written, superbly constructed, have been seen by millions and are devoid of a single feminist plaint. Christie wasn’t just a superb playwright, but also a brilliant novelist; and since time and sales alone decide who is an artist and who is not, she must be acclaimed as perhaps Britain’s greatest literary figure of the 20th century. Her mantle is now being worn with elegant aplomb by another magnificent writer, JK Rowling. Throw in that other female literary genius Daphne du Maurier, and together their commercial success and influence knock the top dozen male 20th-century English novelists for six.

The unsubsidised market, over decades, is the final arbiter of what is art. And the unsubsidised privately owned theatres of the West End or Broadway have failed to find a single woman playwright to match the success of female novelists. Why? Is it because misogynistic theatre-owners loathe profit, preferring instead to stage wretched, loss-making plays by incompetent men rather than mount superior and wealth-generating plays by women? Or is it that women don’t write very good plays?

Consider the English woman playwright most often staged in London, Caryl Churchill, a middle-class socialist feminist who writes bitterly acerbic, socialist-feminist tracts. Exactly what it says on the tin, ire means dire, and yes, I think I’ll stay in tonight, again.

Maybe it’s all to do with the female mind, and the intricate stories that women tell which now follow the linear narrative of the novel. But plays are two-dimensional flat-packs on paper and must be imaginatively assembled by others. The playwright creates and supplies the drama kit with instructions; strangers are entrusted to present it. This requires authorial faith and restraint.

Male dramatists write explicitly for collaboration. Female novelists ruthlessly control their material.

I respect the passion of the women protesting outside the Abbey on Thursday, but it was misplaced. The deciding issue is not maleness but the market. Women don’t write very many marketable plays.

Merely because 2016 is the centenary of that evil day when some men and a few women — in gender-proportion even more unequal than the Abbey’s commemorative playwrights — chose to ignore the right to life of others and embark on a killing spree, doesn’t mean we should all similarly ignore one fundamental truth: if there are so many brilliant but neglected women playwrights, where are they? [email protected]
Click to expand...
 
Theodore Kaczynski said:
Ray D’Arcy is under fire for his ‘sexist’ interview with Pamela Anderson

Ray, Ray, Ray... I wonder what his wife thinks.
Click to expand...
To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.


Weren't T&A her stock in trade? You have a superstar of the masturbation industry complex on and you can't mention her oops-my-boobs shtick?
How would you interview Fabio? Or Richie Kavanagh?

Why was she on anyway? Her Hep C?
 
New posts

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 1 (members: 0, guests: 1)
Activity
So far there's no one here
Old Thread: Hello . There have been no replies in this thread for 365 days.
Content in this thread may no longer be relevant.
Perhaps it would be better to start a new thread instead.

Similar threads

pete
Printing a book from an iMessage conversation history
Replies
1
Views
346
flashback
flashback
rettucs
Smokers
3 4 5
Replies
98
Views
4K
Cormcolash
Cormcolash
dudley
  • Question
Apple Music vs Spotify question
2
Replies
31
Views
2K
pete
pete
rettucs
Interesting places to stay
Replies
5
Views
566
flashback
flashback
dunderhead
  • Question
Wedding present suggestion….
Replies
5
Views
618
pete
pete

Support thumped.com

Support thumped.com and upgrade your account

Upgrade your account now to disable all ads...

Upgrade now

Latest threads

Latest Activity

Loading…
Back
Top